Less obvious but potentially more dangerous are the engineering risks
in a single, global schema, because there are significant areas where
developers might legitimately disagree about how resources should be
arranged. Should business users record the corporate credit card as a
part of myWallet, alongside their personal credit card, or as part of
myBusinessPayments, alongside their EDI and purchase order
information? Should a family's individual myCalendars be a subset of
ourCalendar, or should they be synched manually? Is it really so
obvious that there is no useful distinction between myTV (the box,
through which you might also access DVDs and even WebTV) and
myFavorite TVShows (the list of programs to be piped to the TiVo)?

Microsoft proposes to take over all the work of defining the conceptual
entities of the system, promising that this will free developers to
concentrate their efforts elsewhere:

By taking advantage of Microsoft's significant investment in
HailStorm, developers will be able to create user-centric solutions
while focusing on their core value proposition instead of the
plumbing.

Unmentioned is what developers whose core value proposition is the
plumbing are to do with HailStorm's global schema. With Hailstorm,
Microsoft proposes to divide the world into plumbers and application
developers, and to take over the plumbing for itself. This is
analogous to the split early in its history when Microsoft wrote the DOS
operating system, and let other groups write the software that ran on
top of DOS.

Unlike DOS, which could be tied to a single reference platform -- the
"IBM compatible" PC -- HailStorm is launching into a far more
heterogeneous environment. However, this also means that the
competition is far more fragmented, and given the usefulness of
HailStorm to developers who want to offer Web services without
rethinking identity or authentication from the ground up (one of the
biggest hurdles to widespread use of Sun's JXTA), and the possible
network effects that a global credentials schema could create,
HailStorm could quickly account for a plurality of Internet
users. Even a 20% share of every transaction made by every Internet
user would make Microsoft by far the dominant player in the world of
Web services.

Non-Microsoft Participation

Also in Clay Shirky -- Decoding P2P:

How will Hailstorm and Passport change the face of P2P, web services, and the Net itself?

With HailStorm, Microsoft has abandoned tying its major software
offerings to its client operating systems. Even if every operating
system it has -- NT/Win2k, PocketPC, Stinger, et al -- spreads like
kudzu, the majority of the world's non-PC devices will still not be
controlled by Microsoft in any short-term future. By adopting open
standards such as XML and SOAP, Microsoft hopes to attract the world's
application developers to write for the HailStorm system now or soon,
and by owning the authentication and schema of the system, they hope
to be the mediator of all HailStorm users and transactions, or the
licenser of all members of the HailStorm federation.

Given the decentralization on the client-side, where a Java program
running on a Linux box could access Hailstorm, the obvious question is
"Can a HailStorm transaction take place without talking to Microsoft
owned or licensed servers?"

The answer seems to be no, for two, and possibly three, reasons.

First, you cannot use a non-Passport identity within HailStorm, and at
least for now, that means that using HailStorm requires a
Microsoft-hosted identity.

Second, you cannot use a non-Microsoft copyrighted schema to broker
transactions within HailStorm, nor can you alter or build on existing
schema without Microsoft's permission.

Third, developers might not be able to write HailStorm services or
clients without using the Microsoft-extended version of Kerberos.

At three critical points in HailStorm, Microsoft is using an open
standard (email address, Kerberos, SOAP) and putting it into a system
it controls, not through software licensing but through copyright
(Passport, Kerberos MS, HailStorm schema). By making the system
transparent to developers but not freely extensible, Microsoft hopes
to gain the growth that comes with openness, while avoiding the erosion
of control that also comes with openness.

This is a strategy many companies have tried before -- sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn't. Compuserve collapsed while pursuing a
partly open/partly closed strategy, while AOL flourished. Linux has
spread remarkably with a completely open strategy, but many Linux
vendors have suffered. Sun and Apple are both wrestling with "open
enough to attract developers, but closed enough to stave off
competitors" strategies with Solaris and OS X respectively.

Hailstorm will not be launching in any real way until 2002, so it is
too early to handicap Microsoft's newest entrant in the "open for
users but closed for competitors" category. But if it succeeds at even
a fraction of its stated goals, Hailstorm will mark the full-scale
arrival of Web services and set the terms of both competition and
cooperation within the rest of the industry.

Richard Koman's WeblogSupreme Court Decides Unanimously Against Grokster
Updating as we go. Supremes have ruled 9-0 in favor of the studios in MGM v Grokster. But does the decision have wider import? Is it a death knell for tech? It's starting to look like the answer is no.
(Jun 27, 2005)